Light and Momentary

I Could Eat Her Up

Enough angst! Let's have a cute baby video instead.

My favorite part is that ten minutes later she was asleep. I laid her down gently and scooted away. With her eyes closed she shook her head again: "No no no no, I'm not going to take a...zzzzzzz." Isn't she the cutest?

Hamster Wheel, Paused

Stella and I made the trek to campus today, and it was a good trip. Have I mentioned lately how much I love my advisor? I love love LOVE my advisor. She is A-OK with the fact that my baby and I are a package deal at this point. She doesn't mind if I keep Stella nearby during meetings with students. She is happy to schedule phone meetings to talk about my dissertation, or if I am coming to town she is willing to walk around campus while we talk, so that the baby can watch squirrels instead of eating computer cables in her office.

Today we took some time to talk about my mental hamster wheel, and she said, "What's most important is what you want to do. Not what your husband wants, or what your mother wants, or what I might expect. What would you like your life to look like next year?"

I told her that if the half-time post-doc were local, I would jump on it. The commute worries me, though. It's hard on my family if I'm away more than one day a week.

And do you know what she said? She said, "I don't see why we would expect more face time of a half-time post-doc than we would of a full-time doctoral student. It depends on who's mentoring you, of course, but I think one day a week on campus would be fine."

One day a week I could do. Maybe Elwood would go back to working 4 ten-hour days each week, or maybe I would take Stella along with me. I know some mothers in that community and I'm optimistic about finding a home where she could play while I was in the office. Post-doc positions are flexible enough that I could bop over and nurse her down at naptime.

Funny that a ten-minute conversation could leave me feeling so much calmer.

Go Round and Round

That's what my thoughts do these days; they go round and round. Friday is the application deadline for that local faculty position. I think about it all the time. If they offered it to me, would I want it?  I think about that half-time post-doc an hour away. If they offered it to me, would I want it? I think about having a little home-based private practice. Is that what I want? I think about staying home for a year and catching up on all the things I have let slide around here, and having gingerbread ready for the boys at 3:30 every afternoon, and making really fabulous Halloween costumes.

I think I might run out of gingerbread recipes.

I think I am sabotaging myself by procrastinating on the application packet. I think that in my heart of hearts I don't want to teach three classes each semester in a field that's not my own. I mean, it's close enough that I could make it work. But do I want to?

Maybe this sounds elitist -- heck, maybe it is elitist -- but it's a less competitive program than the one I'm trained for. It's more satisfying to work with more motivated students.

Elwood and I have been struggling a bit with division of labor and I am trying to see it as a providentially timed struggle. If we disagree now about who ought to call the insurance agent and get up with a wakeful baby and handle the swim team drop-off, what should that tell me about next year?

Huh, that sounds really stupid now that I have typed it up: I might turn down a challenging job to stay home because I hate arguing with my husband about who will follow up with the state department of revenue. But it's a consideration. I have read that most marital arguments are about money, sex, kids, and in-laws. We never fight about any of those: we fight about time and responsibility.

Look at that-- I was just about to type something like "so I don't know what to do next year." But then I realized I'd already said it approximately 45 times already in this post and stopped myself. There is a line in an Anne Lamott book that was very helpful to me the last time I didn't know what our next step should be: she quotes the pastor of her church, saying that God doesn't shine a big floodlight on the path ahead. Instead He illuminates the next patch where we should walk, and then the next, and then the next, until this funny Charlie Chaplin gait gets us where we ought to be.

My next little Charlie Chaplin step is to write up a research agenda and a cover letter. And then we'll see. If I keep singing "go round and round" to myself, maybe I'll wind up as the roller derby queen. Dr. Roller Derby Queen -- it has a nice ring, don't you think?

Really Simple But Still Useful Things A Person Can Do In R Even If She Was An English Major

(This was an attempt at a Christmas picture from last weekend. How big is baby Stella? Soooo big. Not big enough to lie down with her brothers and stay put, but soooo big.)

Oh, Google, sometimes you are stupid. You are sending people to my post called "More R Tricks" even though the tricks therein are not remotely tricksy to someone googling "R tricks." I should amend it so the first line says "Keep on googling, because you are in the wrong place. Unless you are an English major."

I do know that these posts have been useful to at least a couple of people, so I am going to keep writing them from time to time. One of the things that made me scratch my head when I was first contemplating my big messy dataset was the need to merge in variables from a couple of even larger and messier datasets. It turns out to be easy-peasy. You can find helpful merging directions here, but this is what I do.

First, I make a new object with just the ID variable and the variables of interest. I am working with a subset of a giant sample (600 kids, 1500 variables), and I could wind up with a boatload of superfluous data. So:

> attach(big.sample) [this lets me work with variable names directly, instead of typing big.sample$ before each one]

> subsample <- data.frame(ID1, IQ, digit.span, zygosity)

Now I have the variables of interest in a smaller data frame called "subsample." I could also do it by column number, if I wanted, as discussed in the post linked above, with a command like this:

>subsample <- big.sample[,c(1, 600, 602, 14)] [this would give me all the rows in those four specified columns]

Next I'm going to merge those three new variables into my smaller database. I'm going to tell R to match by participant ID and only include the IDs that appear in both datasets, like this:

> year1 <- merge(year1, subsample, by = "ID1", all = F)

If you specify "all = T," as in the examples I linked to above, you will wind up with everything from both datasets. Since the command as written tells R to overwrite your old dataset with the new one, this could induce a fair amount of teeth-gnashing. You might prefer to create a transitional object while you are getting the hang of it:

> year1.for.nervous.nellies <- merge(year1, subsample, by = "ID1", all = F)

If your identifying variables have different names in their respective datasets, there is no need to fret. Just do it like this:

> year1 <- merge(year1, subsample, by.x = "ID", by.y = "ID1", all = F) [by.x is the variable name in the first dataset, by.y its name in the second]

Now you can check and see if it worked:

> names(year1)

The last three items should be IQ, digit.span, and zygosity. Now suppose you want some frequency counts for your snazzy new data. Do the boys and the girls shake out equally as identical and fraternal twins? All you need to do is type this--

> table(year1$sex, year1$zygosity)

--and R will tell you all about it.

Oh, Dr. Freud?

I was in a railway station with my baby when I suddenly thought, "Why didn't anyone ever notice that this baby has two heads?" Two lovely heads, with golden-red hair and blue blue eyes, but still: two heads. I wondered, "Why didn't they pick that up on the ultrasound? Did I forget to take her for a well-baby exam? It's lucky that the birth went as smoothly as it did with such a complex presentation. Maybe that's why the pushing was harder this time."

I kept thinking. "We should have named each head separately -- two brains, two souls, right? It's going to be really frustrating for them when they start walking and each head wants to go in a different direction."

When I looked more closely I saw that in my arms I had two babies, joined at the hip but otherwise separate. I gently jiggled the spot where they were conjoined and it separated with a slight metallic click and only a bit of resistance, like those magnetic building blocks.

I cradled one baby, smaller and limper, so that I could not see her face. The bigger baby Stella took my finger and toddled off with me down the steps toward the trains. I was a mother of twins and I never even knew it! I was going to have to tell Elwood that I separated our conjoined twins all by myself.

Then the alarm went off.

Belated

Ten years ago, my friend Angela appliqued a sheep onto a red sweatshirt for Gladly boy #1, and made a sheep quilt for Gladly baby #2, and mailed them across the ocean to lonely me in Scotland. (Angela's hair is probably curlier than mine, and when I wrote her to say that we were moving to Edinburgh she wrote back (we used to write each other letters -- seems so quaint here in the age of the Facebook message) to say, "Do you know what living on the coast is going to do to your HAIR?")

I blogged once about how much I loved our baby quilts, and I am delighted to be using that one again. Angela has a Facebook album full of her handiwork and I offered to send her a picture of the gifts she made for Gladly kids #1 and 2, now in use with Gladly kids #4 and 5.

That was in, like, April. But hey, no time like the present.

When Irish Eyes Are Bloodshot

I thought I'd make colcannon for dinner tonight, but I only had red cabbage. I also had red onion, red-skinned potatoes, and ham. So I made pink colcannon, and it was surprisingly popular.

Mince a red onion and slice a wedge of red cabbage finely. Saute in butter until tender. Add some chopped ham if it floats your boat, and some salt and pepper. While the veggies are cooking, boil potatoes in heavily salted water. You don't have to peel them unless you have time on your hands, in which case you should come to my house and keep me company while I fold laundry. (I started to say you should fold the laundry, but I'm not that bossy.) Mash the potatoes with a truckload of butter. Scoop some out for the baby to smear in her hair. Mix it all together and serve with a little dab of butter melting on top.

Darn it, I was going to post a picture but the baby is fussing. Maybe it's itchy to go to sleep with potato in your hair.

Resolved

This is the sixth November in which I have had a blog, and I am finally doing NaBloPoMo.

Suggestions for post topics are welcome.

Lost and Found (and Smeared)

I was tired of grading so I thought I'd do a little work on my dissertation. I opened up my stats program and asked it to list my stuff for me.

And it said, What stuff? I don't have any of your stuff.

Just Say No

I imagine the Starbucks marketing team sitting around joking about the most improbable thing they could get on a menu. "I know," says one. "Shiitake mocha!" "How about eggplant macchiato?" adds another. The third guy says, "Let's try a pumpkin latte!"

They all look at him and say, "That's so crazy it just might work."

I have complained before about the crazy that is pumpkin in coffee. Pumpkin. In coffee. I mean, what's next? Liver-and-onion cafe con leche? And yet people rave about pumpkin spice lattes.

I thought to myself, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe it's just coffee with the spices we use in pumpkin pie. I like cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger. I like chai. I asked the guy at the counter, Does this taste like pumpkin or does it taste like the spices we use with pumpkin?

Both, he said. It tastes like pumpkin pie.

I'm going to live on the edge, I told him. I'll take a medium.

And oh, my friends, what are we doing, lining up to buy these things? YEA VERILY, the pumpkin spice latte is an abomination in the eyes of me. Have you seen the color of one of those things, people? The orangey glow?

In general I'm an open-minded person, I think. In general I try to be receptive to new ideas. But this is truth immutable, right here at Light and Momentary:

Coffee should not glow.

And the taste! Ugh! Fake chemical-ly non-pumpkin pseudo-spice! Who has perpetrated this scam upon the American people, that they are shelling out $4 a pop for these things?

I have returned from my trip to the edge to say it plain: don't go there. It's a bad edge. It's an ugly edge. I like pumpkin; I like coffee. But never the twain should meet.